Friday May 3rd Open Thread.

I was at the bus stop not super late, but post rush hour. There were a handful of people at the stop. When I saw my bus coming, I walked over and waited first in line. As I stated to board, the driver gave me the wait signal, as someone else was taking a minute to exit.

And then as I was waiting, someone goes around me trying to board. Like I just decided to stop! Then when he realized there was someone getting off the bus, he stayed in the head of the line. Seriously, what?

Massive job creation, ultra-low unemployment, S&P 500 up nearly a percent on the news, so yeah, let’s talk @ 1 about a guy whose claim to fame is he once walked through an intersection downtown without watching what was happening around him.

This is how you’ll get another heaping four-year dose of Trump. An “absolute lock”, some might say, Cz-252.

@2 Warren Buffett knows more about this than you do, and he’s perplexed:

“OMAHA, Neb. — The current economic environment is one that no one could have seen coming, Warren Buffett said.

“In an CNBC interview that aired Friday, Buffett noted that unemployment is at generation lows, yet inflation and interest rates are not rising. While at the same time the U.S. government continues to spend more money than it takes in.

“‘No economics textbook I know that was written in the first couple of thousand years that discussed even the possibility that you could have this sort of situation continue and have all variables stay more or less the same,’ Buffett told CNBC …. These conditions are not sustainable for the long term, Buffett said.”

Roger Rabbit Commentary: I have an idea what might be going on: The way the government measures unemployment and inflation is out of whack.

You see, the government doesn’t directly measure either unemployment or inflation; both of these official numbers are derivatives from other numbers, such as household surveys, and both measures have come under criticism in recent years.

Ask anyone paying rent or buying a house in Seattle if inflation is under 2% and they’ll laugh in your face. Ask senior citizens if they can keep up on their 0% to 2% Social Security colas and they’ll start cursing the bureaucrats who come up with these adjustments. Labor participation remains low, and lots of people think there’s a big pool of chronically unemployed and underemployed people out there. You probably wouldn’t have Trump voters if there weren’t. Many folks have long suspected the government paints a rosy picture of the economy by not counting all the folks who want work and can’t get it — it’s likely one of the very few conspiracy theories that’s actually valid.

Buffett is right, it’s not sustainable, but what’s unsustainable is the bullshit. As P.T. Barnum and others have said, you can fool some of the people all of the time (Trump voters), all of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time. Just ask the average man on the street what he thinks of the government unemployment and inflation figures. He’ll laugh in your face.

The economy isn’t as robust as you and Trump have deluded yourselves into thinking it is, dumbfuck. But I would posit that the economy is all but irrelevant. Trump is such a bad president that people aren’t going to vote their pocketbook’s in 2020. A solid majority of Americans, now well over 50%, see the next election as a plebiscite on whether democracy will survive in our country, and on whether America will be run by Americans or Russians.

“‘No economics textbook I know that was written in the first couple of thousand years that discussed even the possibility that you could have this sort of situation continue and have all variables stay more or less the same,’ Buffett told CNBC …. These conditions are not sustainable for the long term, Buffett said.”

No economic conditions are sustainable. The economy is cyclic and always has been, Roger Dumbfuck Rabbit.

One big reason no textbooks written in the first two post-Christ millenia predicted this is that none of them predicted QE1, QE2, or QE3, either.

We’ve already got Paul Krugman predicting recessions for the past few years, Roger Dumbfuck Rabbit. One of these days he’ll be right. You never will.

@2 “This is how you’ll get another heaping four-year dose of Trump. An ‘absolute lock’, some might say, Cz-252.”

Yeah?

“President Trump’s strongest case for reelection remains the country’s healthy economy, but the potency of that issue for him is complicated by a widespread belief that the economy mainly benefits people already in power, a Washington Post-ABC News poll finds.”

“The court noted it was joining several other federal courts that have recently struck down partisan gerrymanders as unconstitutional. Federal panels in Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Maryland have all blocked electoral districts on grounds that they too severely favored one party over another.”

In this context, of course, the GOP is the favored party. All of these gerrymanders, without exception, were manufactured by Republican legislatures.

So how severe was the Ohio gerrymander? In the 2018 House elections, Republicans got 52% of the statewide vote, but ended up with 12 of the 16 House seats, while the Democrats got 4 for their 47.7% of the popular vote. That isn’t democracy, it’s tyranny.

The Ohio redistricting was carried out by a Republican-controlled legislature in 2011 following the 2010 census. Interestingly, the GOP won 12 of the state’s 16 House seats in each of the following elections — 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018. But look at how the popular vote has changed:

Something is seriously out of whack there. This has struck judge after judge, in state after state, as wrong and contrary to our system of government. Now, Doctor Dumbfuck may crow that SCOTUS will strike down all these lower court gerrymandering overturns, and that may well turn out to be true. But no court operating on logic and the legal principle of “one person, one vote” could do so; it would take a nakedly partisan group of justices, blind to the principles enshrined in the Constitution, to do so. That’s exactly the kind of anti-democratic, antisocial, raw abuse of power he daily cheers here on HA, because he’s an un-American dumbfuck.

So what will SCOTUS do with gerrymandering? I’m unsure how they could wriggle out of striking down so blatantly abusive a redistricting scheme as Ohio’s. Baker v. Carr removed the “political question” cop-out. On a pragmatic plane, it must occur to the conservative justices that if they let Republicans get away with this, Democrats will do it, too, when the shoe is on the other foot. So in the long run it doesn’t really give either party a permanent advantage; instead, you’ll get a seesawing back and forth from one extreme to another that undermines public confidence in our elections and the legitimacy of our government. News reports suggest some of the justices are “wary” of interfering, but surely SCOTUS is capable of devising a uniform test to guide lower courts in how and where to draw a line. Certainly, numerous federal district and appeals courts have had no problem drawing lines, and SCOTUS has grappled with equally perplexing problems involving other issues countless times in the past. So I really think their function here should be to harmonize the lower court rulings into a single uniform rule. Even if you assume this is a purely partisan court now, and I don’t think that’s a safe assumption, I don’t see really Roberts going along with a nakedly partisan decision on a matter of this magnitude; he didn’t with Obamacare, and I think he’ll be inclined to play it safe here, too. So, I’ll be surprised if the SCOTUS majority decides to let all gerrymanders, however awful, stand and puts gerrymandering off limits to the lower federal courts, which up to now have been very willing to actively intervene; but I wouldn’t be surprised to see a 5-4 decision.

“President Donald Trump said he briefly discussed special counsel Robert Mueller’s report with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday, but didn’t warn his Russian counterpart to not meddle in the next US election.”

Roger Rabbit Commentary: Man, I would love to see a transcript of that phone call. But since I don’t have one, I’ll let my writer’s imagination fill in the blank spaces:

Trump: About the Mueller report. Putin: Yeah.

Trump: We’ve got a problem. Putin: Go on …

Trump: First, my polls are shit. I’ve got maybe 28% of the voters. At least 55% will vote for a dog before they’ll vote for me. So I’m gonna need your help again. Putin: And … ?

Trump: It was sloppy last time. We got caught. We’re doing damage control on the Mueller report and it’s possibly contained for now, but he got too close for comfort, and we need to get this farther under the radar next time. Putin: We’re working on it.

Trump: Can you assure me I’ll win in 2020? And won’t be impeached? Putin: Hacking your election computers is no problem. Your people don’t even have to give us the passwords. Although it’s easier for us when your Republican election officials in the counties use passwords like “Trump2020.” Not much we can do about your unpopularity or the investigations, though. We’ve been working on mind control for some years, but so far it only works on dolphins, beluga whales, and Lindsey Graham.

Trump: What if I lose? Then what? Putin: No problem, I’ll still be president of Russia.

9, 10, Who gives a fuck what Teh Dumbfuck’s economic predictions are? He’s vamping his way through the sewer lagoon of GOP corruption pretending Republicans can still get shit done. They’ve proved they can’t (2017-2018). Their proudest moment was seating a rapist on the Supreme Court. They can’t even fill the simplest of vacancies in government without setting their own dicks on fire and then eating them.

Of greater interest for Democrats preparing for 2020 ought to be what role the economy played in the last two elections following the GOP global economic disaster, and what that can tell us about the distribution of voters in 2020. Teh Dumbfuck is almost certainly dead wrong (what’s new?), at least if the voter file data are any indication.

Longitudinal statistical analysis of actual voters across these two cycles demonstrates two very, very important results. First, economically conservative and socially liberal voters are essentially non-existent. They don’t exist. We need to stop talking about them. Campaigning to these mythical voters who do not exist is almost guaranteed to result in losses given the trend lines among the voting population. “Libertarians” are a myth. In the end, self-described Libertarians always abandon their claims to liberal social values in favor of traditional conservative nationalism/racism/intolerance, etc. Second, the distribution of voters overwhelmingly favors liberal economic policy and messaging. Overwhelmingly.

That strong distribution of economically liberal voters played to Trump’s strengths while simultaneously exposing Clinton’s weaknesses. His populist/nationalist message was precisely tuned to appeal to socially conservative voters across the broadest spectrum of economic views. While her liberal establishment message devastated her potential to appeal to a vast pool of socially moderate/economically liberal voters.

Whatever the economic data being reported by the government, the trend among the largest majority of voters is steadily rising dissatisfaction with the economic status quo combined with a rapidly rising adoption of increasingly liberal economic views and preferences. More recent polling data among likely Democratic primary voters indicates that this trend is gaining strength among these voters as we might expect. If that continues through the early primaries it suggests that the campaigns best able to embody a liberal economic message will emerge from the field.

“The Trump administration is considering reversing long-standing policy to make it easier to deport U.S. legal permanent residents who have used public benefits, part of an effort to restrict immigration by low-income people.

“A Department of Justice draft regulation, seen by Reuters, dramatically expands the category of people who could be subject to deportation on the grounds that they use benefits.

“Currently, those legal permanent residents who are declared to be a ‘public charge,’ or primarily dependent on the government for subsistence, can be deported — but in practice, this is very rare. The draft regulation would use a more expansive definition to include some immigrants who have used an array of public benefits, including cash welfare, food stamps, housing aid, or Medicaid.”

… on top of the evidence cited @9 that Republicans are constructing an economy that works only for rich people. Yes, dumbfuck, it’s partly the economy; when you don’t let people participate in it, they don’t vote for you. Down to 28% and counting.

Undocumented Demorat Of The Week Award Results–First Place, Undocumented Executioner David Paneque (D-Cuba) Praises Obama For Excellent Deportation Negotiations with Cuba; “Thanks, Obama For Letting Me Enrich Miami.” —————————- An illegal immigrant accused of murder is stuck on U.S. soil after officials in his home country refuse to accept his deportation because of his criminal history. David Paneque, 29, was allegedly caught on video fatally shooting his friend Leandro Lopez, 31, while the two were at a parking garage in Miami last month. As Paneque sits in jail awaiting trial, it’s been revealed by the Miami Herald that he was supposed to be deported to Cuba nearly two years ago, but the country wouldn’t take him back because of his extensive criminal past. Paneque, who has previous ties to the gang Sur-13 and went by the nickname “Psycho,” was first arrested in 2007 when he stabbed a man several times while robbing him. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison for attempted murder and armed robbery, and he picked up another criminal charge while in jail for attacking guards at his facility. Paneque was released in 2017 but remained in the custody of ICE for a month, during which time a judge ordered that he be sent back to Cuba. The only problem was that, among renewed diplomatic relations with Cuba under the Obama administration, Cuba accepts very few deportations. Last year, they allowed less than 500 people to be returned, despite the fact that more than 37,000 Cuban nationals are facing orders of removal, according to ICE.https://www.foxnews.com/us/illegal-immigrant-accused-of-murdering-friend-on-video-was-supposed-to-be-deported-but-cuba-refused-him

Demorat Pornstar Party Of Russia Hoax & Impeachment Liars News– CNN’s “New Day,” Co-Host Alisyn Camerota (D-PMS) Feels Betrayed By Lying Demorat Fartbags Who Promised To Impeach Trump; “They Told Women They Would Impeach That Vagina-Grabber, Now They Don’t Do Anything Even After He’s Caught In Hundreds Of Crimes, They Were Just Lying To Us.” ———————– Friday on CNN’s “New Day,” co-host Alisyn Camerota lamented the lack of consequences President Donald Trump has faced in the wake of the release of special counsel Robert Mueller‘s report. Co-anchor John Berman said, “If you look at the Mueller report, what Robert Mueller says Don McGahn says is that the president told him to fire Robert Mueller and create a fake paper trail.” Camerota said, “That sounds like obstruction of justice, and they won’t do anything.” Camerota said, “I guess my point, John, and I’m sorry if I sound like they’ve broken my spirit, however— ” Berman said. “That’s what it sounds like. I think that’s the goal too.” She continued, “Well, it’s worked. I think I am channeling many members of the American public who feel these past two years have been disheartening for people who believe in justice. The reason I say that is because, you see in the Mueller report ample evidence laid out of obstruction, of what Robert Mueller considered obstruction, but nothing happens. You see violations of the Emoluments Clause, and nothing happens. Nepotism, but nothing happens.”https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2019/05/03/cnns-camerota-disheartened-by-trump-facing-no-consequence-theyve-broken-my-spirit/

“The Porn Star” is a lifelong registered Republican. She even ran for Senate in Louisiana as a Republican. My boss would never grease up and fuck a Democrat. Never, ever. I wouldn’t let him! But when the coast was clear he ditched a bloated and cranky Melania, post baby delivery, to rendezvous with said porn star and lube up in a private cabana. And I was ready to go!

@28, That’s not fair. You’re leaving out a very important difference between the two shootings.

I’m sure the record of the settlement negotiation would reflect that while the agreed upon value of damages was about the same, in the case of Castile the City argued successfully that he was 86% to blame for his own murder because he insisted on being black.

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